What’s In Your Wardrobe?
Material objects are essential to people living in a Chinese diaspora.
My goal is to create a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Canadian women of Chinese heritage through the lens of fashion. What we choose to wear in everyday lives are telling the world of who we are.
Writing our own narratives is possible. Your story is so important.
About the Curator: I am a second-year Art History MA student at Queen’s University in Canada. My upcoming digital exhibition will explore identity construction, cultural hybridity, and performance of the body of Chinese Canadian women living in the twentieth century. This exhibition will feature ten digital outlooks of Canadian women with Chinese heritage for each decade between 1910 and 2010, based on personal histories and fashion aesthetics shared by the women that I have interviewed. Thank you for taking on this journey with me!
Theoretical Framework
My project, Fashioning the Decades: 100 Years of Dressing in a Chinese Diaspora, uses twentieth-century Chinese Canadian women’s self-fashioning practices as a lens to study their senses of inclusion and exclusion. My primary questions for this research are:
What are some of the driving forces behind twentieth-century Chinese Canadian women’s changing attitudes toward Chinese fashion from adoption to rejection to re-invention?
How do socio-political events and evolving immigration policies shape women’s relationships with their ethnic identities?
History Timeline
Take a Look at Events That Heavily Impacted Chinese Canadian Lives and Fashion.
The Interview
The Exhibition
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Start of the Century: Eye of a Phoenix
Anti-Chinese immigration regulations, political turmoil in China, and social hostilities in Canada influenced early twentieth-century Chinese Canadian women’s choices to immigrate, their status in Canada, and how they expressed their identities through fashion.
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The Wartime: Living the Fantasy through Fashion
From the 1920s to 1949, feminist movements of the “New Woman” in both the West and parts of China as well as the Second World War, contributed to hybridity in clothing and fashion among Chinese Canadian women.
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The Post-War Era: Exploring and Reinventing the Self
In the post-WWII era, Canada’s changing immigration policies, the second wave of feminism, and China’s disoriented politics shaped Chinese Canadian women’s fashion. The Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) resulted in a complete block on China’s relations with the Western world.
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Entering the Millennium: Performing Transnational Identities
At the turn of the twentieth-first century, China’s rapid economic development, globalization, and the rise of digital technologies significantly shaped Chinese Canadian women’s fashion and identity expressions.
“Fashion is the armour to survive the reality of everyday life.”
— Bill Cunningham
I invite you for a virtual meet up in this challenging environment to reflect on our pasts and re-imagine our futures.
Send me an email or a message (14yt12@queensu.ca) if you would like to take part in the public programming or the interview. I am more than happy to answer any questions you might have, or have further discussions about this project.
Credit Lines:
Museums and Archives:
Canadian Museum of History Collection: 85-36.1
Canadian Museum of History Collection: 85-39.3
Museum of Vancouver Collection: H2002.61.6a-b
Museum of Vancouver Collection: H990.284.59
Museum of Vancouver Collection: H986.33.5
Museum of Vancouver Collection: H990.277.83
Museum of Vancouver Collection: H2008.21.2a-e
Canadian Museum of History Collection: 74-10.1-2
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection: 2009.300.1507
UBC Library Chung Collection: CC_PH_00200
Books and Videos:
“Becoming American: The Chinese Experience.” Video file, 4:14:09. Posted by Doctoroff Media Group, June 15, 2012. https://digital-filmscom.proxy.queensu.ca/p_ViewVideo.aspx?xtid=36510
Davidson, Jane Chin. Staging Art and Chineseness: The Politics of Trans/nationalism and Global Expositions. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020.
Eicher, Joanne Bubolz. Dress and Ethnicity: Change Across Space and Time. Oxford: Berg, 1995.
Guo, Jin. Voices of Chinese Canadian Women. Toronto: Women’s Press, 1992.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourses and Post-Colonial Theory, a Reader. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994.
Jorae, Wendy Rouse. “The Limits of Dress: Chinese American Childhood, Fashion, and Race in the Exclusion Era.” The Western Historical Quarterly 41, no. 4 (2010): 451–471.
Kalra, Virinder S., Raminder Kaur, and John Hutnyk. Diaspora & Hybridity. London: SAGE, 2005.
Leong, Karen J. The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Lin, Wessie and Simona Segre Reinach, ed. Fashion in Multiple Chinas: Chinese Styles in the Transglobal Landscape. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2018.
Mar, Lisa Rose. Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Metzger, Sean. Chinese Looks: Fashion, Performance, Race. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2014.
Nelson, Steven. “Diaspora and Contemporary Art: Multiple Practices, Multiple Worldviews.” In Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945, edited by Amelia Jones, 296-316. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
Petrov, Julia. Fashion, History, Museums: Inventing the Display of Dress. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2019.
Poy, Vivienne. Passage to Promise Land: Voices of Chinese Immigrant Women to Canada. Montreal: MQUP, 2013.
Sim, Cheryl. Wearing the Cheongsam: Dress and Culture in a Chinese Diaspora. New York,
Subbaraman, Sivagami. “Catalog-Ing Ethnicity: Clothing as Cultural Citizenship.” Interventions: The Veil: Postcolonialism and the Politics of Dress 1, no. 4 (1999): 572–589.
Wilton, Janis. “Belongings: Oral History, Objects and an Online Exhibition.” Public History Review 16 (2009): 1–19.
Wofford, Tobias. “Whose Diaspora?” Art Journal 75, no.1 (2016): 74-79.
Wong, Kevin Scott and Sucheng Chan. Claiming America : Constructing Chinese American Identities During the Exclusion Era. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.
Yung, Judy., Gordon H. Chang, and H. Mark. Lai. Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.